The Panthers have their coach in Canales. Now it’s time for Tepper to take a back seat

Dave Canales, who has never been a head coach before at any level, just got the top job with the Carolina Panthers.

And there are a lot of things to like about that. Canales is a good age (42) and has a good attitude (relentlessly positive, in the Pete Carroll mold). And his resurrection jobs of two inconsistent NFL quarterbacks over the past two years — Geno Smith in Seattle and then Baker Mayfield in Tampa Bay — were nothing short of spectacular.

Pair Canales with his old buddy Dan Morgan — who also has deep Seattle roots and is now the Panthers’ general manager — and good things may well happen.

But they will only happen if Panthers owner David Tepper now gets out of the way.

Tepper has hired these guys — Canales was announced as agreeing to terms with Carolina Thursday night — and it stands to reason he was deeply involved with that. The jury is going to be out on Morgan and Canales for a couple of years, although with the Panthers going an NFL-worst 2-15 in 2023, they’ve got just about nowhere to go but up. If Canales wins eight games in 2024, he’ll be the NFL’s Coach of the Year.

Obviously, Tepper believes these are the right men to run the Panthers.

And now, as difficult as it may be for Tepper, he needs to let those two smart men actually run the team. We don’t need any input — and absolutely no drinks thrown — from the owner’s box.

It hasn’t worked when the Panthers’ billionaire owner has tried it the other way. Including interim head coaches, Canales will be the seventh head coach Tepper has employed, and 2024 will only be his seventh NFL season owning the Panthers.

Although Tepper claims he is known as a very patient man in the financial world where he made his billions, in the NFL it’s undeniable that he’s had a perpetually itchy trigger finger.

This time, though, it must be different. It doesn’t necessarily sound like it will be different. The Panthers’ press release announcing the hiring said both Morgan and Canales would report directly to Tepper, although to be fair the Atlanta Falcons said the same thing about their GM and new coach Raheem Morris both reporting directly to owner Arthur Blank on the very same day that Canales was hired.

Remember what Tepper said on Nov. 28, shortly after he had fired head coach Frank Reich only 11 games into what was supposed to be a four-year coaching contract for Reich?

Thinking ahead about his next head coach, Tepper said: “I would like to have somebody here for 20-30 years. I’d like to have somebody that would say the eulogy at my funeral in 30 years, or maybe 40 years.”

It was an odd thing to say — I mean, do you have your own potential eulogists picked out already?

But I also thought it was perceptive. Tepper, 66, knows he has to connect on a Hail Mary soon for this NFL thing to work. And the easiest way to do that would be to hire a beloved head coach who wins and with whom he has a close relationship for decades.

Can Canales succeed where others failed?

For Canales to give that eulogy in a few decades, though, he will have to succeed in Charlotte big-time in a job where everyone in the post-Ron Rivera era has failed.

Canales’ background is an impressive one, from his Mexican-American heritage to his climb from small-school obscurity to his leaps in the NFL. He’s only been a play-calling offensive coordinator in college or in the pros for a single season — in Seattle, he didn’t call the plays — but I don’t think that’s a problem.

I’m most enamored with what Canales did with Mayfield, because Mayfield in Carolina was a football disaster that we all witnessed up close.

Mayfield’s performance got Matt Rhule fired five games into the 2022 season more than any other single factor. Under Rhule and the rest of the coaching staff, Mayfield turned into a jittery QB who lacked confidence, got balls batted down left and right and made two bad throws for every really good one.

Mayfield went 1-5 as a starter in Carolina, and looking back I’m not sure how he even won the one game. By the end, interim head coach Steve Wilks didn’t want him either, enough so that he demoted Mayfield to third string and then (at Mayfield’s request) released him.

Yet Canales figured it out with Mayfield, just as he’s going to have to figure it out with Bryce Young. It was that fact — along with Canales’ close ties to Morgan — that helped him emerge from a field of a dozen candidates. Canales is expected to call the plays with the Panthers, too.

As Carolina Panthers quarterback Jake Delhomme told me about Canales a little more than a week before this deal happened: “I tell you what, that guy might be a name to watch. ... He’s a Pete Carroll disciple, so everything is about competition, but positivity. And I think he brought that to Baker. ... When Baker is in a great mindset, he just lets it fly.”

The only way it can work out for Panthers

At Carolina, Mayfield was never in a great mindset. But Canales coached him beautifully after the Bucs hired him to replace Tom Brady. And Canales also schemed out ways to get the ball to skill players who, to be fair, were about 80% better than the skill players the Panthers employed in 2023.

Morgan has to solve that personnel problem — and Carolina has issues just about everywhere on offense. And then Canales has to figure out how to make Young into his third straight successful QB improvement project over the past three years.

Young is 5-foot-10 and Mayfield is officially 6-1, but if you stand next to the two of them, honestly, you would barely notice a height difference. The fact Canales already has gotten it done once with a vertically challenged QB is significant.

Young also needs to show a little more passion on and off the field, and I think Canales can help him there. Carroll was very good at that, merging positivity with fire and brimstone when it was required. Canales also has a deep Christian faith, as well as a wife and four kids who will help keep him grounded.

It all sounds good in theory, but it always sounds good in theory at this point.

Go back to the sonnets that were written in praise of Reich and Rhule after they were hired; all of that is very similar at this point in the game. And then both of them got dumped, embarrassingly, in the middle of consecutive seasons. They didn’t win enough, which has been the single most common thread in the Tepper era.

Carolina’s next real game, in September 2024, will be Tepper’s 100th as the Panthers’ owner. In the first 99, the Panthers have had six straight losing records and an overall mark of 31-68 and gone through six head coaches (under Tepper, Rhule was actually the longest-tenured one of those coaches, lasting 38 games).

Were Canales and Morgan a top-tier coach/GM combo on any other NFL teams’ list?

No, they weren’t. But Tepper could have done a lot worse.

I believe Canales and Morgan really can work.

But only if Tepper leaves them alone.